Outspoken troops find model in earlier war

Both 21, from loving families, high school graduates of 2003. Both daydreamed about cars and girls but deferred the safe simple life and joined the military. Both were sent to Iraq.

Adam Stevens returned home to Newport News in August for a bracing respite before heading back to the hot zone.

LeeBernard Chavis shipped home to Hampton two weeks ago for a wrenching memorial service before heading north for burial at Arlington.

We wrote about both men on the same day. Needless to say, in starkly different terms.

Their commonality is that death dogged them in and around Baghdad for a good long while.

Their stories are both tragedies -- Chavis for a life interrupted and Stevens for continuing to live in the cross hairs every single day. Both because their country asked them to.

Increasingly, this country is reconsidering.

Polls find more Americans worry that we're squandering the lives of our young men and women in Iraq. Even conservative politicians, anxious over elections and over the war, are rethinking their support.

Everyone, it seems, is weighing in -- except for the population with the most to lose.

Then last week -- for the first time since this wretched war began -- a small group of active-duty service members took the bold step of calling on Congress to get us out of Iraq and bring U.S. troops home.

It couldn't have been easy for them. Not when your patriotism gets questioned if you so much as twitch while saluting the flag. Not from men and women in uniform who earnestly believe in their country, right or wrong.

Imagine how very wrong they must feel our country has gone to speak up like this.

They did so under the Military Whistle-Blower Protection Act, which gives service members the right to contact elected representatives without fear of reprisal.

One organizer is a Navy seaman stationed in Norfolk. "While we do serve our country," Jonathan Hutto said in the Daily Press, "we feel this occupation (of Iraq) should come to an end."

He and about 200 men and women in uniform used as their model the active-duty soldiers of a generation ago who called for an end to the Vietnam War. By 1971, those soldiers numbered more than 250,000.

In 1971, public support for that terrible conflict had likewise plummeted. Between 60 percent and 80 percent of Americans polled favored immediate withdrawal.

Servicemen, too, were fast losing their taste for battle. On April 18 of that year, Vietnam veterans began converging on the capital for a historic weeklong protest.

The next day, 1,100 of them -- some in wheelchairs or on crutches -- followed a delegation of mothers whose sons had died in Vietnam across the bridge from the Lincoln Memorial to the Arlington National Cemetery. All were barred from entering.

Over the next few days, other veterans marched to the Pentagon and the Supreme Court. Some tried to turn themselves in as war criminals.

Veterans lobbied members of Congress, which held hearings on the distortion of news and information about the war, as well as on atrocities that U.S. soldiers freely admitted committing.

About 800 veterans marched to a barricade around the Capitol, and many threw their Purple Hearts, their Bronze Stars, their Silver Stars and campaign ribbons across.

One of those veterans was John Kerry, who addressed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He spoke passionately about a country that gave its young men "the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history."

He spoke of soldiers returning guilt-ridden over atrocities that they saw or committed on a daily basis and burdened by a sense of anger and betrayal "because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country."

He spoke against being asked to pacify a hellhole, with no plan as to how. About being told month after month that "the back of the enemy was about to break."

By the time that these soldiers launched their protest, we had been shipping U.S. troops into Vietnam in earnest for seven years or more.

One of the questions that Kerry put to senators was how you ask someone to be the last man to die in Vietnam -- "the last man to die for a mistake."

You wonder who will be the last American to die in Iraq. Chances are it will be someone unremarkable, except for the notoriety of their place in history. Someone who planned for a safe, simple life but never quite made it.

Hutto and his 200 compatriots wonder the same thing. They feel duty-bound to speak up, and they're right. It's what they owe themselves, each other and the country they serve.

Other service members should take note. Then log on to www.appealforredress.org.